Conceived as a replacement for religion, English was institutionalized at the height of the Victorian deification of Shakespeare, swapping the old Judeo-Christian God for one that Britain had ready at hand. "An institution," Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "is the lengthened shadow of one man." And the Academic institution of English literature, as the scholar Nancy Glazener writes, can be understood as a shadow cast by Shakespeare, though this shadow is "an effect of Shakespeare's having been positioned and lit retrospectively."

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

Around the mid-nineteenth century, however, the field began to professionalize. A discipline called English literature arose, founded on and formed around Shakespeare. It arose, first and foremost, as a substitute for religion. For centuries, Christianity had exerted a pacifying influence on the population, encouraging values of meekness and self-sacrifice, and unifying all classes, from the richest congregant to the pious peasant, under a single ideology. But by the Victorian period, religion was threatened by scientific discovery and social change. Church attendance among the working classes was falling. Social unrest seemed to be building. The church was losing its hold on the masses, and the Victorian ruling class worried that, without religion to encourage morality and restraint, something like the French Revolution could happen in Britain. A new religion was needed; a discourse that could provide the unifying, pacifying function formerly provided by Christianity. As the scholar Terry Eagleton writes, "If one were to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than to reply: 'the failure of religion.'"

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

"Yes," Painted Red said. "Phones. It seemed, in those days, that the more the angels had to ride on, and talk over distances with, and get together by, the more separate they became. The more they made the world smaller, the greater the distance between them."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

How rich the surplus of energies was by the seventeenth century one may partly judge by the high state of horticulture in Holland: when food is scarce one does not grow flowers to take its place.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

The expansion of the machine during the past two centuries was accomplished by the dogma of increasing wants. Industry was directed toward the multiplication of the desire for goods. We passed from an economy of need to an economy of acquisition. The desire for more material satisfactions of the nature furnished by mechanized production kept up with and partly cancelled out the gains in productivity. Needs became nebulous and indirect: to satisfy them appropriately under the capitalist criterion one must gratify them with profitable indirectness through the channels of sale. The symbol of price made direct seizure and gratification vulgar: so that finally the farmer who produced enough fruit and meat  and vegetables to satisfy his hunger felt a little inferior to the man who, producing those goods for a market, could buy back the inferior products of the packing house and the cannery.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

To keep time was once a peculiar attribute of music: it gave industrial value to the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantey of the sailors tugging at a rope. But the effect of the mechanical clock is more pervasive and strict: it presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest. When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter's night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Culture consists in drawing out what is implicit in creation, unfolding the various aspects of reality by reacting to and shaping our environment. Culture is to be interpreted in its original sense of "formative control" or "formgiving." This, we recall, is the nuclear moment of the historical sphere; hence Dooyeweerd can say that culture "is the way that reality reveals itself in the historical aspect." The history of human culture is the story of the myriad of ways in which men and women have sought to open up creation through interacting with the natural world and with each other.

—Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation's Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts

The quest for meaning and knowledge represents the theological and metaphysical stages of history. Now, in the scientific stage, man moves not in terms of myth and meaning, not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of utility. The real question, we are told, is not, "What does this mean?," but, "How can I use it?" Man must renounce meaning and knowledge for the pragmatic use of things. The goal of learning therefore is not knowledge but the power to manipulate. In dealing with either men or things, our purpose under pragmatism and relativism becomes not a knowledge of them but the power to manipulate them.

—R. J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty

German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten is generally credited with establishing aesthetics as a distinct discipline. His goal, if you will, was to isolate beauty in something akin to a specimen jar and then examine it with the rigor a scientist might reserve for biology or chemistry. Approaching knowledge in this manner was a boon to science, of course, as well as to some approaches to art history. But for men and women eager to form a truly modern self, the isolation of beauty would cause it to grow increasingly arcane. As philosopher Alexander Nehemas suggests, "The creation of an aesthetic domain and the elaboration of a doctrine of fine arts were meant to establish the epistemological authority of sensory perception and to secure the spiritual rights of beauty. To that end the eighteenth century placed the arts side by side with the sciences in a setting in which each was to become increasingly impervious, even incomprehensible, to the other."

—Cameron Anderson, The Faithful Artist

Death with dignity normally is not thought to be secured simply by allowing to die: It must be imposed, even enforced, by imposing that strange "right" to die; in other words, by mercy killing. Do we not like the word killing? Unless it is just the sound we do not like, we dare not swallow the surrogates "right to die" and "death with dignity." If it is the thing in itself that we do not like, namely the killing of patients by their healthcare professionals, we must relentlessly expose the sugary words intended to help the "medicine," that deadly draft, go down.

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

The physician, once called in to see a patient, has an open-ended responsibility for that patient's well-being. She or he has in the past worked through that responsibility in the terms we have noted: healing if possible, treating symptoms if not. The notion that the physician is really attending to consumer wants is novel. Not only so, it is subverting the whole system of health care in opening the door to medical killing; for if medicine is consumer driven, death may be what the consumer wants.

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

The Bible shows that poverty will be abolished through godly productivity and rising real wealth. The biblical answer is not, as the saying goes, to redistribute the pie, but to make a bigger pie.

—David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators

The first thing that strikes one about the classicism of this period is that it does not rest on immediate perception like that of the Greeks but on outer authority. The merely dogmatic and traditional classicist gave a somewhat un-Greek meaning to the doctrines of nature and imitation. Why imitate nature directly, sad Scaliger, when we have in Virgil a second nature? Imitation thus came to mean the imitation of certain outer models and the following of rules based on these models.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Out of the turmoil incidental to the Great Revival came a number of schisms among the evangelical denominations active in the West. Doctrinally conservative, the Presbyterians were quick to scent heresy and to throw out the unorthodox. As a result, they soon began to divide by fission. New Lights, Cumberland Presbyterians, Seceders, Old School and New School Presbyterians, and many other names for dissident groups indicate the division within the ranks. The Baptists and Methodists were also riven by controversy. But these sectarian divisions owe less to the frontier than they do to the beliefs implicit in Protestantism. They merely illustrate a tendency which had been in operation since the Reformation. When the Reformers conceded that men could read and interpret the Scriptures according to the dictates of their consciences and could dispense with a priest as intercessor with God, they opened a Pandora's box which they could never close thereafter.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

It might be objected that "human" beings have never existed and never could exist without others, nor, consequently, without judgements of right and wrong. This was the common eighteenth-century opinion. But Rousseau really escapes this criticism, since the creature he paints is admittedly not human, but pre-human, "living in a state of animality".

—Lester Crocker, "Introduction", in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Men are less prepared then they were to stub their toes against unpalatable objective truth.

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different in itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something that tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in the imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

—T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society

A living tradition is based upon the principle of imitation: what has proven to work well and, in the hands of artists with an individual personality, this “imitation” gradually acquires, after their period of apprentice, the stamp of originality. Originality is a psychological quality, a personality trait, and can never be a conscious intention. The very few pupils Maurice Ravel accepted had to work according to this principle: they had to closely imitate carefully chosen examples and if they felt they had to deviate from them, it was — as Ravel said — in the deviation that their originality showed itself.

—John Borstlap, The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21^st Century

There is no direct line of development from Beethoven (i.e. Viennese Classicism) to Schönberg other than a merely historic succession of random events, as there may be between the architect building a house, different generations of people living in it for a period, and the construction worker who demolishes it much later.

—John Borstlap, The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21^st Century